Online Payment: Accept Payment Through Your Website!

Accepting payment online is an absolute must to people who transact business online. As an online marketer, if you cannot process orders online, you lose a lot of money in lost sales. But if you can accept credit cards, you increase your sales in your online home business to over 300%. With technology, it's easy to process orders online. You just have to paste a code within your web page.

You can accept online payment by either setting up a business account or using a third party credit card processor. To set up a business account, you have to make arrangements with your bank or any other online company of your choice. There are quite many professional companies on the internet like marketingtips.com/creditcards/ that can help you. Using a third party credit card processor does not require a merchant account. In most cases it involves setting up a form and/or putting a link on your order page.

To accept payment online through a merchant account, you need to use a secure server (a web server that supports any of the major security protocols, like SSL that encrypt and decrypt messages to protect against third party tampering) and a shopping cart system. While a secure server protects your customers' information, a shopping cart enables your customers to do online shopping and run the totals of what they have bought together with the total cost.

Let me focus more on accepting payment online through third party credit card processors. If you do not have a merchant account, third party credit card processors can process for you your credit card orders so easily, even if you do not have a credit card account. It's easy and doesn't entail any monthly charges. You are only charged a "per-transaction" fee and a reserve fee. When you make a sale and payment is made through them, they send you payment less the transaction and reserve fees. A reserve fee is some little amount withheld to cover any charges you may have. If you do not incur any charges within a specified period of time, the reserve fee is then given back to you.

There are several prominent third party credit card processors but for illustrative purposes, let me focus further on Paypal.com. Paypal.com is a big company that allows any business or customer with an email address to securely, cost-effectively and conveniently send and receive payments online. It enables you to easily sell your products and services on your website. There is no setup fee involved apart from a small transaction fee charged upon making a sale.

How do you set up a Paypal account?

To create a Paypal account, you just visit their website, paypal.com, and sign up for either a personal account or a premier account or a business account. The personal account is mainly for individuals who only send money to make payment of products purchased. The premier account enables an individual to sell and buy online and the business account is for businesses to sell and buy online.

If you already have a Personal Account, you just log in and click on the "Account" button located at the bottom navigational links to upgrade either to Premier Account or Business Account, basing on your preference and nature of your business. Upon completion of filling in the details in the form provided, you will receive a link through your Paypal email address. Click on the link to be directed to a page where you will select the preferred mode of payment and create a Paypal payment button. A code will be provided to you, which you will have to paste into your webpage.

You can also integrate a shopping basket, obtainable from other service providers in partnership with Paypal (Paypal provides a list of them) at a monthly subscription charged depending on the package you select.

Lastly, your online ordering process should include a sales page, an order page and a thank you page. Your sales page should have a well written sales copy with a link to your order page. Your order page should include a form and a special link provided by your third party credit card processor (Paypal). The link will direct your customers to a form residing on the payment processor's website. The thank you page is aimed at thanking your customers for the purchase with detailed payment information of the transaction made.

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Charles Kiyimba provides popular, proven, tested and Great Home Business Ideas to people who want to start their own home online businesses. Visit now to start a Home Online Business that will enable you to create multiple streams of income and to become financially secure in your life.